Inner Lives of Objects – Touch Responsive Sculptures

 

In this project, you will be working with casting, Arduino, video, audio, and sensors to develop and build a work that responds to the presence and interaction with the viewer. Ultimately, we will have 2 showings of the final project at the end of the semester, one in Arlington for Noise Awareness Day, and one in Horizon Hall. With successful completion of this project, and enough required contact hours, each student will earn a Mason Digital Micro-credential as well. 

Inner Lives of Objects – Touch Responsive Sculptures

 

Sculpture has historically been understood as a static, material-based discipline, yet contemporary approaches increasingly explore how objects interact with their environment, viewers, and digital media. In this project, students will create cast cement sculptures that become interactive through capacitive touch sensors, triggering audio and/or video projections in response to human presence.

 

The project asks:

 • What does it mean for an object to “respond” to the body?

 • How does interactivity shift the meaning of a traditionally static form?

 • How does casting—often associated with permanence and fixity—relate to ephemerality and transformation through digital media?

 

Materiality & Object Agency

 

This project is informed by the ideas behind Object Oriented Ontology and Speculative Realism, which challenges the assumption that objects are inert, passive, or purely functional. These theories argue that matter has a kind of vitality, a force that influences the world and those who interact with it.

 

By embedding electronic components into cast sculptures, students will explore how objects might “speak” or “react,” giving them an apparent inner life that is only revealed through touch. This aligns with Bennett’s concept of thing-power, where objects exert agency and shape experience, rather than being mere recipients of human action.

 

Through hands-on experimentation with sensors, Arduino programming, and audiovisual mapping in Vuo, students will expand their sculptural practice into a responsive system where material form, digital media, and viewer interaction converge.

Reading:

Alien Phenomenology, or What It’s Like to Be a Thing -Chapter 3.pdf

 

Artwork examples: